18 Facts About Alex Boraine

Alexander Lionel Boraine was a South African politician, minister, and anti-apartheid activist.

Alex Boraine was born in Cape Town and grew up in a poor white housing estate.

Alex Boraine would leave high school in Standard 8, two years before matric and started working as a ledger clerk.

Alex Boraine was asked to stand in 1974 South African general election and was elected to parliament as an MP for the Progressive Party in the Pinelands constituency, won by only 34 votes.

Alex Boraine resigned in 1986 together with Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, believing that the South African parliament was not relevant in establishing a non-racial South African society.

From 1986 to 1995, Alex Boraine headed two South African nonprofit organizations concerned with ending apartheid and addressing the legacy it left behind.

Alex Boraine was one of the main architects of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Alex Boraine was involved in drafting the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 34 of 1995.

In 2001 Alex Boraine co-founded the International Center for Transitional Justice, an international human rights NGO.

Alex Boraine served as ICTJ's president for three years, and subsequently, the chairperson of ICTJ's South Africa office.

Alex Boraine travelled to many countries that were in transition from dictatorship to democracy, at the invitation of governments and NGOs, to share the South African experience.

Alex Boraine was a member of the advisory board of Directors and a Global Visiting professor of law at the NYU School of Law's Hauser Global Law School Program.

Alex Boraine published five books, including A Country Unmasked, published by Oxford University Press in November 2000, and A Life in Transition, published by Struik Publishers in June 2008.

Alex Boraine was awarded the Order of the Baobab in 2014.

Alex Boraine survived prostate cancer in 2008 but by 2015 he was diagnosed with bone cancer with three to 12 months to live.

Alex Boraine died in his sleep on 5 December 2018 in Constantia, Cape Town, at the age of 87.

Alex Boraine died exactly five years to the day that Nelson Mandela died.

Alex Boraine is survived by his wife Jenny, his four children, Andrew, Kathryn, Jeremy and Nicholas and seven grandchildren.